“It’s amazing how, even in a short amount of time, a plethora of items and feelings can be exchanged. From your favorite hooded sweatshirt to the proclamation of eternal love and telling each other your deepest darkest secrets.”
– Gator

When I was a boy, my parents never liked each other; they fought all the time over seemingly stupid things, and it tore a hole in the bindings of our family. Now that the children have left the old home to become the busybody adults we were born to be, all my parents have is each other to stand by, to nurture one another and to love. As a child, I thought divorce would have been their best option, for the familys sake and sanity. I remember telling my father how I felt in the matter, that they should divorce and get split custody of the children. Dad, being arrogant with pride, looked me in the eyes and told me, No son, we’re staying together for the childrens sake. I didnt quite know what he meant by this at the time, and it seemed to go against his own wishes and inclinations, but I nodded my head anyways and pretended to understand what he was talking about. Upon retrospect, their love for one another has bound them together, in holy union, forever. Their marriage is the epitome of what I thought marriage should be. Beyond the legal vernaculars and state sponsored tax-breaks, marriage isnt something granted to just anyone, especially the weak-willed. Marriage is something to work towards, to fight for and to believe in.

And this is where my story begins. In the summer of 2004, in a flash of light and love, I fell madly, desperately in-love with my future wife. After living with her for only a short period of time, I knew we were to wed. She was the one I wanted to share my life with; in moments of passion or in instances of fear, she was to be my constant, eternal, forever. I wanted to have a commitment to something bigger than her, or me, or anything wed ever experienced. Our marriage was to be the bonds of our existence, or so I thought. But instead of reiterating this story on this website, here you can find the story of our love, from conception to destitution.

Needless to say, things did not go as planned. The relationship came to an abrupt end, which sent my mind spiraling in directions I never fathomed existed. 99 Letters was a promise I made to myself during this time of intense emotional hardship; these letters were to be my saving grace. To manifest these thoughts into written words was the cathartic nurture I needed to survive my own intensity. I had to get these thoughts outside of my head; otherwise they would have killed me, if I didnt kill myself first. These letters are the testimony of my love, hate, desire and disinterest for my ex-wife. Never did I mean to harm her in any way. What was written was solely for therapeutic reasons, and would never manifest into any sort of action or aggression towards her. If you’ve ever written a letter to someone dear to you, but never sent it out of fear of how they might react, then you can empathize with these letters. I wrote these letters addressed to my ex, thinking she would never read them. When I first started writing, she was a literal character who I could imagine receiving the letters. As I continued writing, she became an abstraction or a metaphor for my psychological distress. Now, she is but a vague distant memory disjointed and muddled by reflections of myself in an emotional cesspool.

The 99 Letters art project will go as follows: I will release one letter per day, for 99 consecutive days. The format will not change. When the last letter is uploaded, the site will be finished, the divorce will be finalized and I will have moved on from this chaos that was my marriage. I will be left with a body of written work, historicizing the cycle of the dichotomatic relationship between loving and loathing.

99 Letters is the documented process of the visceral and emotional experience I had during my divorce. Writing these letters was an attempt to articulate my thoughts artistically and creatively. Read these memoirs as you would read a fictitious book. Syndicate entries using RSS and Comments (RSS).